Google’s Self-Driving Car
The tech giant hopes to cut the number of auto accidents in half….
Google is developing—and has extensively tested—technology to build an autono- mously self-driving car .
Moreover, Google engineers have already driven a fleet of them around the San Fran- cisco Bay Area, to the tune of over 140,000 miles, Google said in a blog post.
The cars “just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard,” Sebas- tian Thrun, a distinguished Google software engineer, said in the blog post. “They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe.”
Described as being in the “experimental stage,” Google said it hoped that its technol- ogy would be used to develop the self-driv- ing cars of tomorrow, cutting the number of lives lost in auto accidents—1.2 million annu- ally, according to the World Health Organi- zation—by as much as half.
The cars themselves leverage technology used in tests sponsored by DARPA, which has sponsored competitions to develop an autonomous car that can self-navigate off roads and on city streets. In 2006, the agency tested city driving, and, in 2007, involved negotiating a “city” on an aban- doned airbase. Google said that it had hired several members of those teams, including: Chris Urmson, the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge; Mike Montemerlo, the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge; and Anthony Levan- dowski, who built the world’s first autono- mous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge.
To reassure Bay Area drivers suddenly nervous about sharing the road with a self- driving car, Google said that the cars were always manned, and could be taken over in an instant by a driver. Google did not say how many times this had occurred.
“We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as eas- ily as one disengages cruise control,” Thrun wrote. “And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By map- ping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes famil- iar with the environment and its characteris- tics in advance.”
The tech giant hopes to cut the number of auto accidents in half….
Google is developing—and has extensively tested—technology to build an autono- mously self-driving car .
Moreover, Google engineers have already driven a fleet of them around the San Fran- cisco Bay Area, to the tune of over 140,000 miles, Google said in a blog post.
The cars “just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard,” Sebas- tian Thrun, a distinguished Google software engineer, said in the blog post. “They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe.”
Described as being in the “experimental stage,” Google said it hoped that its technol- ogy would be used to develop the self-driv- ing cars of tomorrow, cutting the number of lives lost in auto accidents—1.2 million annu- ally, according to the World Health Organi- zation—by as much as half.
The cars themselves leverage technology used in tests sponsored by DARPA, which has sponsored competitions to develop an autonomous car that can self-navigate off roads and on city streets. In 2006, the agency tested city driving, and, in 2007, involved negotiating a “city” on an aban- doned airbase. Google said that it had hired several members of those teams, including: Chris Urmson, the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge; Mike Montemerlo, the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge; and Anthony Levan- dowski, who built the world’s first autono- mous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge.
To reassure Bay Area drivers suddenly nervous about sharing the road with a self- driving car, Google said that the cars were always manned, and could be taken over in an instant by a driver. Google did not say how many times this had occurred.
“We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as eas- ily as one disengages cruise control,” Thrun wrote. “And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By map- ping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes famil- iar with the environment and its characteris- tics in advance.”
